Valerir Jarrett is a Chicago Democrat Party power broker and President Obama’s most trusted advisor. The slum lord side of her business has been known to those active in politics for a long time, but outside of Chicago what is less known is that the Chicago Tax Board of Review, which is headed by Cook County Democrat Chairman Joe Berrios, is essentially ran as a RICO enterprise trading influence and donations for big breaks on property tax assessments. We wrote about this as a part of a larger story on Chicago corruption HERE.

[See the RICO filing against the Chicago BOR HERE. The RICO complaint charges the Commissioners on the Board of Tax Appeals and their staff with extortion and bribery. It states that the Commissioners, powerful members of the Cook County Democratic Party and the Machine, grant tax reductions based upon the campaign contributions made by property tax law firms and lawyers who practice before the Board of Review. Institutionalizing “bribery and quid pro quo as the mandatory means for the adjudication of tax appeals” in Chicago.]

Senior White House adviser and long-time Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett’s role in a number of controversial Chicago housing developments has garnered her investments worth millions of dollars while highlighting the administration’s extensive business ties to presidential donors.

Before joining the Obama administration in 2009, Jarrett was president and chief executive officer of the Habitat Company, a real estate development firm founded by major Democratic donor Daniel Levin. Before that, she served three years as commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development under Mayor Richard Daley.

She valued the investment at between $1 million and $5 million on her 2011 financial disclosure form, up from $250,001 in 2010. A Jarrett spokesman told the Washington Times that the investment was “a direct result of her 13 years working for Habitat.”

Cook County records show the Kingsbury property is worth around $27.2 million, but thanks to a series of legal appeals beginning in 2003, the land and building are assessed at a much lower value for tax purposes. Since 2008, the property has been designated a “special commercial structure” and is taxed at a value of just $6.8 million, or 25 percent of the actual value.

Asked how such a property could enjoy such a low taxable value, an official with the Cook County Assessor’s Office told the Free Beacon that the property’s owners “must have good attorneys.”

Valerie Jarrett and Barack Obama

In addition to Jarrett’s investment through her former employer, she received deferred compensation of more than $556,000 in January 2009, on top of her $302,000 salary the previous year.

Levin, the firm’s founder, has close ties to the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. Levin and his wife, Fay Hartog Levin, are long-time acquaintances of the president’s, and have personally donated nearly $1 million to Democratic candidates and committees since 1989, including about $25,000 each to Obama.

The Levins each hold personal stakes in the Kingsbury development worth at least $1 million as of 2011.

Jarrett’s involvement in Chicago real estate development between 1992 and 2009 was marred with controversy, much of which centered on Habitat’s role as the sole developer for “family public housing,” a status granted under a district court ruling in 1987.

Under Jarrett’s leadership, Habitat oversaw the development of a number of public housing projects, one of which, in the Cabrini Green neighborhood, was dubbed a “national symbol of urban despair.” Others became so run-down the city had to ask the federal government to intervene.

A 2003 Harvard Law Reviewarticle cited the decline of the Cabrini Green development as an embodiment of the negative consequence associated with the “privatization of public housing.”

“They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are profiting from this displacement,” Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle of Southside Together Organizing for Power, a Chicago community organization, told the Boston Globe in 2008.